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How to Add a Picture Password to your Google Forms

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Google Forms have this “all-or-none” problem. The forms are either public (anyone can fill your form) or, if you are on Google Apps, you can create forms that are visible to everyone in your organization. It is however not possible to restrict access to forms to specific people. Another shortcoming is that Google Forms do not allow passwords or CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots from filling your forms with random data. Google itself maintains the reCAPTCHA project but it is not known if integration with Google Forms is in the works. There is a workaround, though. Google Forms with Picture Passwords Google Forms do not support CAPTCHA but they do offer an option to attach images with questions. These can be used as picture passwords. The idea is simple. We add a multiple-choice question where the user is asked to pick an image from a selection of multiple images. If they select the correct image, the main form is displayed else an error message i...

How to Generate a Report of Bounced Email Addresses in Gmail

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Some of the email messages you have sent through Gmail might not get delivered at all. There could be a problem with the recipient’s email address, their mailbox could be full or maybe the mail server could be specifically blocking your emails due to the content of the message. When an email message is returned, you get a bounce-back notice from MAILER-DAEMON@gmail.com  and it will always contain the exact reason for the delivery failure along with the SMTP error code . For instance, an error code 550 indicates that the email address doesn’t exist while a 554 indicates that your email was classified as spam by the recipient’s mail server. How to Get a List of Email Addresses that Bounced It is important to keep track of your bounced messages and remove all undelivered email addresses from your future mailings as they may adversly affect your sending reputation. Mail Merge  keeps track of all your bounced messages in Gmail but if you...

An Undocumented Gmail Trick – Search Emails by Date and Time

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Gmail supports a plethora of search operators to help you instantly find that elusive email message buried in your mailbox. You have  size search  – like larger_than:5mb  – to find the big messages in your account. File search – like has:attachment filename:doc – will locate email messages that contain file attachments of specific types. This graphic illustrates all the known search operators that work both on Gmail and Google Inbox. Date Search in Gmail Date search in Gmail helps you locate emails sent or received in a specific period. Here are some examples: newer_than:7d from:me – Emails sent in the last 7 days after:2016/12/01 to:me – Emails received in the month of December 2016 Specify Time Modifiers in Gmail Search Gmail also supports time-based searches allowing you to find emails in the specific hour, minute or second. For instance, you can limit your Gmail search to emails that were received between Dec 10 8:15 PM and Dec 10, 2016 8:45 PM. To get s...

How to Receive Notifications for Google Forms on your Mobile Phone

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The Email Notifications add-on for Google Forms will send you the form data in an email message each time a respondent submits your form. You can use the same add-on to also send automated emails to the form respondents immediately after they complete your Google Form. The popular Google Forms add-on has been updated and it can now send push notifications to your mobile devices as well. That means when respondents complete and submit your online form, you’ll get an instant real-time notification ( sample ) on your iPhone or Android phone. The notification text can also include answers from the Google Form. A fast response time is a key to success, especially in areas like customer service and closing sales leads, and mobile notifications will ensure that your important form entries are never lost in the daily deluge of emails. Setup Mobile Notifications for Google Forms It takes a few easy steps ( video tutorial ) to get up and running. Install  Email Notificat...

Make a Bookmark to Quickly Restart Google Chrome

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Google Chrome, most would agree, is a memory hog. Open a few website tabs in Chrome and your system slows down to a crawl. The most recommended solution is that you uninstall the non-essential Chrome add-ons  and restart your browser to release some RAM. How do you restart Chrome? Close the browser and double-click the application icon on the desktop to launch it again. That’s the usual way but Chrome also offers a special URL that makes it easy to restart Chrome from the address bar. Go to the browser address bar, type chrome://restart and hit the Enter key. Voila! The browser restarts itself. Make a Chrome Restart Bookmark If you restart Chrome frequently, it may be a good idea to create a bookmark that will help you restart with a click. Here’s how. Press Ctrl+D (Windows) or Cmd+D (Mac) to bookmark this page in your browser. Now click the Edit button on the bookmark screen, put chrome://restart in the URL input field and click save to create the restart bookmark. That’s ...

How to Make Someone Else’s YouTube Playlist Your Own

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Millions of YouTube users are working diligently to organize this ever-growing database of videos into playlists that make the YouTube experience even more enjoyable. Looking for inspiring Steve Jobs speeches on YouTube? Classic nursery rhymes for kids? Popular music videos of Adele? Well, chances are that some YouTube user may have already curated the best videos for a topic into playlists that you can watch on any device with a click. You can even download YouTube playlists on your Android or iPhone for offline viewing. Meet YouTube Copier, a web app that lets you copy YouTube Playlists of another user to your own account. https://t.co/T295US6vJ8 http://pic.twitter.com/a2CEtD7RH1 — Amit Agarwal (@labnol) November 16, 2016 Save Playlists vs Copy Playlists When you open any video playlist on YouTube, you have the option to save that playlist. This is like creating a bookmark that you can revisit later to watch that playlist again. However, it is a read-only playlist and you ha...

How to Embed Images from Google Photos into your Website

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Google Photos is the best service for backing up your digital photos to the cloud. They have no storage restrictions, your can upload images as well as videos, and visual search helps you find photos by people or things in them. There’s one feature though that’s still missing in Google Photos. You can easily share your photos with anyone using a simple link but Google Photos offers no option for you to embed an existing image into a website. That is, if you have already uploaded an image onto Google Photos, you can’t directly embed it into your website through Google Photos. I wrote an app to help you embed #GooglePhotos in your website https://t.co/cDt4NorvWi http://pic.twitter.com/mq7J4h4qzj — Amit Agarwal (@labnol) October 25, 2016 Google Photos as an Image Host Embed Google Photos  is a new web app that, as the name suggests, makes it extremely easy for you to pick any image hosted on Google Photos and place it on a web page using simple HTML code. Here’re the steps i...